This talk will cover the latest work they have been doing in messaging and why it is a good fit with Erlang/OTP toolkit, along with some of the new things they have done to open up the worlds of HTTP message (Comet, BOSH, etc.).

Hi5 has been a great supporter of BayFP and has offered to host again. You need to RSVP to attend.

2009 03 25

Don Syme will speak on F# for our next meeting, Thursday, Nov. 20th, 2008 at 7:30pm.

Title: Functional, Parallel and Asynchronous Programming with F#

Abstract: In this talk we’ll take a look at F#, a fun, productive and expressive functional language for the .NET platform now becoming an officially supported language in Microsoft’s Visual Studio. We’ll take a F# in general and then dive into a particularly powerful and interesting feature of F# called asynchronous workflows, which enable lightweight structured task programming for mixed CPU and I/O parallelism.

We’ll be at the Hi5 offices again at 55 2nd Street, Suite 300 in San Francisco and about a mile from the train station. Because we’re expecting a big turnout, we’re just going to bring drinks and no pizza. Please eat before (or after)!

Entrance instructions:

Give your name to security in the building entrance, and they will let you up the elevators. On the 4th floor, someone will be there to lead you to the meeting.

2008 10 23

Our next speaker will be Douglas Crockford, Senior JavaScript
Architect at Yahoo!, discoverer & maintainer of JSON, ECMAScript
committee member, and author of JavaScript: The Good Parts (O’Reilly).
He’ll be speaking on “Functional JavaScript”

We’ll be at the Hi5 offices at 55 2nd Street, Suite 300 in SF and about a mile from the train station. Because we’re expecting a big turnout, we’re just going to bring drinks and no pizza. Please eat before (or after)!

Entrance instructions:

Give your name to security in the building entrance, and they will let you up the elevators. On the 4th floor, someone will be there to lead you to the meeting.

2008 09 22

Our next speaker will be Douglas Crockford, Senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo!, discoverer & maintainer of JSON, ECMAScript committee member, and author of JavaScript: The Good Parts (O’Reilly). He’ll be speaking on “Functional JavaScript”:

JavaScript is the world’s most misunderstood programming language. It is the most popular programming language in the world, while at the same time being one of the least liked. In JavaScript there is a beautiful, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. The best nature of JavaScript was so effectively hidden that for many years the prevailing opinion of JavaScript was that it was an unsightly, incompetent abomination. JavaScript is a functional language. It is the first lambda language to be accepted by the mainstream.

Hi5 has offered to host. They’re at 55 2nd Street, Suite 300 in San Francisco and about a mile from the train station.

We’ll see you at 7:30pm on 10/15/08!

As always, BayFP meetings are open to the public. Please bring a few $$s if you’d enjoy some pizza. No pizza this time, just drinks.

2008 09 19

A quick reminder that the September meeting is Thursday the 18th at 7:30pm. We’ll be at LinkedIn, 2029 Stierlin Ct. Mountain View, CA 94043. The speaker is Nick Gerakines, “Developing Erlang at Yahoo”.

We’ll arrange a carpool from the Mt. View Caltrain station to the meeting and back. The carpool will leave at 7:15pm and return at 9:30pm. If you need a ride or have a car and can offer to drive, then please signup here.

2008 09 17

BayFP returns to the South Bay on Thursday, September 18 at 7:30pm with a talk by Nick Gerakines

Developing Erlang at Yahoo
Yahoo is no stranger to functional programming languages. It has had significant products in languages like Lisp and Scheme. Somehow Erlang, and other function languages, are often overlooked when most developers are researching various problems and systems. This is very unfortunate given the power and flexibility that these languages provide. At Yahoo there are places where functional languages and make a phenomenal difference in the way problems and solutions are approached. This presentation will cover how Erlang, a powerful and flexible functional language, gave us exactly what we needed at a critical time and how it was approached as a production language at Yahoo.

2008 08 24

Buy a Feature: An Adventure in Immutability and ActorsSpeaker: David Pollak, Lift Web FrameworkAbstract: I will discuss the functional programing paradigms that we used to build Buy a Feature, a multi-user, web-based, real-time, serious game. These paradigms include Actors to manage concurrency, event streams as the sole mechanism for gameplay, and various immutable data structures that are composed based on the event streams. I will also briefly touch on the Scala programming language and lift web framework.

I will then discuss the experience of adding new team members to the project, the kind of defects in the application (hint: none are concurrency related), the experience of adding new features, and a general discussion of how well functional paradigms translate into a real-world web application.